In his final farewell speech to the nation, President Biden made a series of false claims about how great of a job he has done on the economy, foreign policy, and crime. Once again, he declared that his policies were responsible for “bringing violent crime to a 50-year low.” That is a bizarre claim that shouldn’t go unchallenged. But no matter how you measure crime, crime has not been at the lowest rate in the last 50 years.
Americans in many parts of the country see that products at CVS and Walgreens stores are behind plexiglass. A customer must call for a clerk to unlock the glass and then wait while the customer reads and examines the different packages. Americans know that things were not like this a few years ago. But it isn’t just property crimes that have been increasing.
The U.S. Department of Justice provides two measures for crime: the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2023 National Crime Victimization Survey, which measures both reported and unreported crime, and the FBI’s count of crimes reported to police. Data for both measures is now available through 2023.
For decades, we have known that most crime victims don’t report crimes to the police. So, the U.S. Department of Justice set up the Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which surveys 240,000 people each year to determine whether they have been victims of crime.
During the Biden administration, the NCVS shows total violent crime (rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) has soared by 55%, with a 42% increase in rapes, a 63% increase in robbery, and a 55% increase in aggravated assaults. These are historically large percentage increases in violent crime. The increases shown by the NCVS during the Biden-Harris administration are by far the largest percentage increases over any three years, slightly more than doubling the previous record.
The opposite was true during President Trump’s first term when violent crime fell by 17 percent.
The FBI’s data on reported crime showed a 6.6 percentage point drop during Biden’s first year, but there was a slight total net increase over the next two years (rising by 4.5 percentage points in 2022 and falling by 3.5 percentage points in 2023). Biden wants to claim the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act is responsible for the drop in violent crime, though he didn’t sign the bill into law until 2022, and it is hard to see what he could have done to drop crime in 2021.
In any case, even using the FBI’s measure of reported violent crime, the violent crime rate was not only higher than 2021, but there were other previous recent years where it was lower, such as 2014.
The gap between the NCVS and FBI data is understandable. For example, over the past few years, the number of police officers has declined because of cuts in budgets and many retirements. One result is that police departments nationwide, from Charlottesville and Henrico County, Va., to Chicago to Olympia, Wash., are no longer responding to calls unless the perpetrator is still there actively committing the crime. Instead of police coming out to investigate and take a report, residents in those jurisdictions can still go to the police station and wait in line to get a police report filled out. In addition, despite the widespread belief that calling 911 is enough to report a crime, the FBI officially doesn’t tally 911 calls. It only counts crimes when police make out an official report.
Biden can make the argument that violent crime is near a 50-year low if he just wants to look at only the FBI’s measure of crimes reported to the police. But it is now not the lowest violent crime rate in the last 50 years. If you want to look at total violent crime, Biden’s claim isn’t even remotely correct.
John R. Lott Jr. is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. He served as senior adviser for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs and the Office of Legal Policy at the Justice Department.
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